How much of woman’s suffering and degradation, under the horrors of an unnatural maternity, are owing to herself, I will not say. My appeal is to husbands, and I would show them the extent of their responsibility in this crime. Doubtless, woman might save herself much anguish and suffering, if she would approach man frankly, in womanly love, tenderness, and dignity, and open to him the depths of her soul in regard to Maternity, and the relation in which it originates. Men are not all below the brutes, in their nature. If woman were true to purity, to justice, to her own nature, and would be just and true to her husband and her children, and freely and lovingly converse with man on these relations and functions, he would, often, with manly pride and affection, respond to her. On no subject would a true and noble man respond to the words of a pure and trusting woman with more manly pride and dignity, and a more conscious self-respect, than on Maternity, and the relation that leads to it. Let wives, then, be true to themselves, if they would have their husbands true to them!
H. C. W.
LETTER VI.
WORDS FITLY SPOKEN, BY ONE WHO SPEAKS WITH AUTHORITY.
Dear Friend:
Would you secure for yourself, your wife and your children, a pure and happy home? Of one thing, then, you must never lose sight. You now regard your wife as fitted to be your companion, intellectually and socially, as well as affectionally. Be sure that no effort is wanting, on your part, to keep her so. If her intellect becomes stunted, and she be deprived of the means and opportunities for improvement, while you enjoy every opportunity to cultivate and enlarge your intellectual powers, how can she possibly feel herself fitted to be your equal companion?
Let me ask you carefully to read over the “Appeal of the Wife to the Husband,” in the last letter. Mark well what she says on this subject; how she feels, as she finds herself losing all power to sympathize in the intellectual aspirations and pursuits of her husband. She, intellectually, was sinking, while he was rising; was growing poorer, while he was growing richer; and he took little pains to impart to her his increasing intellectual wealth. All opportunities for intellectual growth were precluded by the anxieties of maternity, which he, without a thought for her intellectual welfare, was constantly imposing upon her. Never impose this function upon your wife, at the expense of her intellectual growth. No wife can ever be made intellectually poorer by maternity, and the cares of a mother, when that relation is joyfully welcomed, and those cares are shared by the husband. But how can a wife’s intellect ever be expanded with new and noble thoughts, when the physical sufferings and mental anguish of a frequent and an undesired maternity are ever present?
Stay at home with the mother of your children, except when necessary avocations call you away. Share with her the cares, the anxieties and joys, of the nursery. There cultivate your intellectual powers together by reading, and by conversation,—especially, on all subjects pertaining to parentage and the ante-natal, as well as the post-natal, development, education and life of your children. How anxious will every true and loving husband and father be, to unite with his wife and the mother of his children, in the nursery, to impart and to receive all possible light in regard to these matters!
Neither should you ever impose maternity on your wife at the expense of her social nature. Never go abroad to enjoy and develop your own social nature, and leave her at home alone in the nursery, preparing to give birth and a worthy reception to your child, or to spend her weary hours in solitude, in anxious watchings over your children, and in longings for your presence and your sympathy. Stay with her, and share with her all the joys and all the sorrows, all the sweet rest and all the weary labors, of a maternity imposed by you, and of developing into noble men or women the offspring of your mutual love.
But how crushed, intellectually and socially, must that wife become, on whom an ignorant, a thoughtless, or a brutal husband, is ever imposing a maternity from which her soul recoils! Her intellect becomes dwarfed and her social nature dead. How can it be otherwise, especially when driven to the deed of ante-natal murder, to escape the horror of giving birth to children accursed by the mother that bore them? Hope becomes extinct, and the light of her soul goes out in utter darkness!
The following letter must speak for itself. It is nearly a verbatim extract from a letter, the original of which is now before me. No man, especially no husband, can read it, and not feel quickened in all that is truly manly, noble and God-like. Of this woman, as to her style and her sentiments, every true man will feel that to be true which the people said of the teachings of Jesus—“He speaks as one having authority.” May her words of power find a response in the heart of every husband and wife, and of every man and woman!